Workers' Liberty

Memories of Leon Trotsky by Max Shachtman

Max Shachtman

The disclosure [in Trotsky’s diary of 1935] that Trotsky contemplated taking his own life, or, as he put it himself, reserved the right to determine the time of his death, will startle, perhaps even dismay, many who followed his rich and robust career.

By Natalia Sedova Trotsky

“I can therefore say that I live on this earth not in accordance with the rule but as an exception to the rule.” Trotsky: June 8, 1940.

Leon Trotsky October 1879 — August 1940 - The Spartacus of the 20th century

Trotsky’s critics

The assassination of Leon Trotsky

Natalia Sedova Trotsky

“I can therefore say that I live on this earth not in accordance with the rule but as an exception to the rule.”

By Larissa Reissner

Jean van Heijenoort was for seven years (1932-9) Trotsky’s secretary. Here he outlines the story of Trotsky’s break with the Communist International and turn towards building a new international. His account of Trotsky’s reasoning on the class nature of the USSR is an important element in the history of post-Lenin revolutionary Marxism.

Anatoly V. Lunacharsky

I first met Trotsky in 1905, after the event of January [when the Tsar’s soldiers opened fire on a peaceful demonstration in St Petersburg]. He came to Geneva, I have forgotten whence, and was to speak with me at a big meeting called to discuss that tragedy.

By Charles Cornell*

One must understand Trotsky’s passionate devotion to the cause of the oppressed to appreciate the full import of his work. He hated the injustices and indignities forced on man with his whole being. His polemics against political opponents are not at all the brilliant stylistic exercises which his petty-bourgeois critics make them out to be. Nor did he dash them off with the literary glibness which they attribute to him. Trotsky’s powerful and incisive writing merely reflects his ardent convictions in the struggle for the liberation of mankind. The barbs of his sharp pen were completely at one with his hatred of all that degraded humanity. The style was truly the man. He did not write with facility at all; his polished writing was the result of strenuous and lengthy application.

By Jean van Heijenoort

Everything that the liberals have written on Lenin is barren, revealing the limitations of their thinking rather than Lenin’s genius. An even more difficult object study for them is Trotsky.

Introduction

The legacy of the Bolsheviks

The fact that the Bolsheviks staked their whole policy on the world revolution of the proletariat is precisely the most striking testimony to the range of their far-sightedness, to their fidelity to principles, and to the daring impetus of their policy…